Chapter 50
Harrison’s pov
I have spent five years perfecting the art of not flinching.
She breaks that record in approximately four seconds.
'Was it wrong of her to love me?'
Her voice shakes on the last word, and before I can shut it down, something in my chest responds. A tightening. Involuntary.
My thumb is still pressed over the puncture wound on her hand. The pressure is causing her pain — I know this with complete precision — and I don't move it, because the alternative is letting go entirely. And I am not ready to do that.
She tells me to release her.
I don't.
"Harrison." Half gasp, half fury. Not enough breath for both.
My hand goes wrong before my mind can correct it. Her knuckles catch the corner of the cabinet.
The sound is very small. It lands in my sternum like a fist.
I am at the door before I have consciously decided to move. Behind me, I hear the nurse arrive — brisk footsteps, professional disapproval, the opening line of a speech about stress and pregnancy and how men have their pride.
And then Sienna's voice, flat and without inflection: "How am I supposed to not care?"
I stop walking.
She knows I'm still within earshot. She says it anyway — not as an accusation, not as a performance, just as a fact she is apparently done keeping to herself. It hits the back of my neck like cold water.
The next four days, I have her phone removed and her sedation managed through standard post-procedure orders. I tell myself it is protection. It is the only kind she will currently accept from me, which does nothing to make it feel like less of what it actually is.
On the fifth day, I go myself.
Marcus offers to send a car. I tell him no.
"Is there anything you'd like me to prepare at the estate, sir?"
"No."
Another pause. "Understood."
I don't explain myself to Marcus. But I sit in the back of my own car on the way to the hospital and I am aware — with the same cold precision I apply to everything — that I am not doing this for the child.
She stares at me when I appear in the doorway. A half-second of genuine surprise, unguarded, before she reassembles herself into something careful.
What I am not prepared for is how she looks.
She has always been thin. But there is a difference between slender and diminished, and what I am looking at now falls into the second category. The anger arrives before I can stop it — not at her, exactly, but at what we have become. Two people sharing a last name and nothing else. I swallow it.
I think, without meaning to, of the first time I saw her — one hand on her hip, chin up, surveying a room full of people who expected her gratitude and getting her mild indifference instead. She wasn't trying to be difficult. She simply hadn't yet learned to make herself smaller. I remember thinking it was remarkable.
I look at her now, propped against the hospital pillows, and the distance between that woman and this one sits in my chest like swallowed glass. I shut the thought down. What-ifs are a luxury for people who haven't already made their choices.
We don't speak on the drive back. I am angry at her silence, which is unreasonable, because I have given her every reason to be silent. The anger is unreasonable across the board. I am aware of this. I am angry anyway.
When we reach the estate, she moves to fall into step behind me. I stop.
"Come here."
She doesn't move. Her chin lifts — the angle she uses when she's deciding whether something is worth fighting about.
I repeat myself.
She comes, already forming some complaint, and I pick her up before she can finish it. The stairs are uneven near the landing — I know this, I have always known this — and she is in no condition to navigate them alone. That is the reason. I am settled on that. Her whole body goes rigid for one startled second, then goes still in a way that isn't resistance. Her pulse hammers against my forearm. Unguarded. The most honest thing she's given me in four days. She is lighter than she should be.
"You need to be careful in this house. Those stairs aren't safe for you right now."
She tucks her chin down, not quite agreeing, not quite arguing. "Okay," she says quietly.
Elena's voice finds us in the foyer — bright, warm, performed — and I feel Sienna go slightly tense in my arms. Elena is standing at the foot of the stairs, eyes moving from my face to Sienna, then back.
"Harrison." She tilts her head. "Adrian's birthday is this weekend. A cake, something small. I thought you might want to be there."
Sienna turns her face toward my ear. "You can go," she says, low. "I'm already home."
She shifts her weight. A small test of my grip.
I don't loosen it.
"Ask Martha to go with you," I tell Elena. "I have things to handle."
A beat of silence. Then, quietly: "Of course."
I don't turn around to look at Elena's face. What I am aware of is Sienna, who goes still, then turns to look back over my shoulder at Elena with an expression I catch only in profile. Unhurried. Satisfied.
Something shifts in my chest. I tell myself it's only that I don't want to leave her here alone. Not like this.
I set her down in the bedroom and don't leave. She arranges a pillow behind her back, then looks up with the careful expression she uses when she hasn't yet determined what I want.
"Are you going to stand there all day, or is there something you actually want to say?"
"You should rest."
"Then why are you still here?"
I sit down on the edge of the bed. Closer than necessary. She doesn't move back.
"Talk to me. Normally. Without the walls up."
"I don't know what that means coming from you." Her voice is even. "You've never talked to me normally either. Every conversation we've had has been a negotiation or a verdict. So don't ask me to drop something you've never dropped yourself."
She almost never pushes back like that. Directly. Without dressing it up.
I reach out and tip her chin up. "Then let's try."
She holds my gaze for a moment, and something in her expression shifts. Tired of the distance.
"Fine," she says. "Talk."
I lay out the terms. No work until the birth. Expenses on my account. The divorce, after. Clean. I keep my voice level. The part I don't say out loud — the part I don't examine too closely — is that I don't want her back in that studio. I don't want her near Vane.
She almost laughs. "That's just a different delivery method for orders."
"You can make a counter-demand."
"Anything?"
I hesitate. Brief. She catches it immediately.
"Tell me what you want."
The almost-laugh leaves her face entirely. What replaces it is something stripped down — Sienna without the armor on.
"Would you actually agree to it?"
She doesn't wait for my answer.
"I want to know who pushed my mother toward that ledge." Her voice is steady. Practiced. The voice of someone who has been holding this sentence for a very long time. "Was it Elena? Or was it someone else in this house?"